Kelly matriarch yields secrets of a life less ordinary

She peers out at us from the long-ago past. The terrible years of tragedy and privation have taken their toll but, even at 79, Ellen Kelly looks strong and resourceful. As she ever was.

The mother of Ned, Australia's most famous outlaw, Ellen Kelly's story has been overshadowed by that of her son, yet it was as dramatic. Now, after 125 years, she is before the public gaze again.

A collection of early photographs that she compiled of her wild brood, their relatives, friends and comrades-in-arms, some dating back to the early 1870s, will go up for auction at Christie's saleroom in South Yarra on Tuesday. Passed down through the family for generations, with others from different sources, they offer a rare glimpse of people who have become part of our history.

Christie's head of rare books and manuscripts, Michael Ludgrove, estimates the 100 or so photographs could fetch up to $200,000, with previously unknown pictures of Ned, his mother, Kelly gang members and their sympathisers likely to create new records. The highest price for a Ned Kelly photograph was set in 1987 at Sotheby's in Melbourne when a tattered, full-length shot of Ned in a fighting pose fetched $19,800, almost double the estimate.

The latest catalogue cover, though, shows Ned "in his respectable years". With a $20,000 upper estimate, it is the most highly valued and is also the only known image from the "honest, hard-working period" of his life. It even shows his worn boots that Mr Ludgrove believes may be those held by the State Library.");document.write("

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Yet it is the tiny, sepia-toned pictures of Ellen Kelly that capture the imagination. In one, taken to celebrate her release from prison in 1881, she is with some of her children, the family dog and friends outside the slab and bark-roofed homestead, built by Ned four years earlier. Another shows her at 79 in 1911 with two granddaughters, seated outside the last house she occupied, while a third was taken at Benalla railway station in 1917 on her way to Melbourne.

Ellen Kelly lived through the days of the Victorian gold rushes, the pioneering horse-and-buggy, candles and kerosene-lamp era. She was alive when the first steam trains puffed their way north to the Murray River at Echuca, when the first motor cars coughed along the state's dirt roads, when the first planes spluttered across the sky, when electricity replaced gas lamps in Melbourne, and ghostly voices could be heard coming from the wireless.

Born in 1832 in Ireland's County Antrim, Ellen Kelly married twice in Australia and, although a widowed mother of 11, she was sentenced in October, 1878, for a crime she did not commit, to three years' hard labour. She lived to tell her great-grandchildren of her exploits and died in 1923.

"People blame my boys for all that has happened," she recalled. "They should blame the police. They were at the bottom of it all . . . We were not getting too rich but were doing all right. It was a lonely life but we were all together and we all loved each other so dearly . . .

"The trouble began over a young constable named Fitzpatrick . . . He tried to kiss my daughter Kate and the boys tried to stop him. They were only trying to protect their sister but his story was believed . . . After that, nothing but misery. And it has been nothing but misery ever since."

Fitzpatrick had gone to the house to arrest Ned's brother Dan. The policeman, though, was a liar, perjurer and drunkard and soon after was sacked. But not before Sir Redmond Barry - the judge who later sentenced Ned to hang - sent Ellen away for three years.

In his famed Jerilderie letter - a copy sold at Christie's last August for $58,750 - Ned writes bitterly of Fitzpatrick and the other police who persecuted the family: "They kept them six months awaiting trial and then convicted them on the evidence of the meanest article that ever the sun shone on . . . (Fitzpatrick) has the wrong appearance of a manly heart, the deceit and cowardice is too plain to be seen in that puny cabbage-hearted looking face . . ."

On November 10, 1880, Ellen visited her first-born son the night before he hanged. Her last words were: "Mind you die like a Kelly, Ned." Legend has it that as the noose was tightened around his neck, Ned murmured philosophically, "Such is life". He was 25 years old.

Ellen Kelly kept all the remarkable photographs that had been taken over 50 years and they were passed down to her granddaughter, Elsie Pettifer. Elsie's grandson, Leigh Olver, says the photos became scattered around the family and held in cupboards or under beds until finally it was decided they should be put up for sale.

"These are all the photographs the family has, a unique collection showing part of the Kelly story that has never been explored because they've been hidden away," he says.

"We thought they should be made more widely available and, to find their true value, they need to go to auction where the right people can see them. My wish is that they go to the State Library or Sydney's Mitchell Library, where they can be accessed by everyone."

Christie's sale of Australian history, literature and sport begins at 2.30pm on Tuesday.